Many A Death To Come.

(Originally posted to Substack in March 2025)

I muse on death a lot. Not killing or dying myself - more… social, political, logistic, and emotional overlaps. The work I want to do in life right now revolves around it, and making the weight of death easier in terms of navigating the current ways it needs to be navigated. My reasons for this are:

I am deeply invested in the socio-political nuances of anything, because life and death both are affected by the nuance.

I have an intimate relationship with my own grief, and how death translates into change.

No one avoids death. It isn’t inherently gentle, and I know so many people who have had death rocket into their lives like a glass dropped on tile. The shattering is metaphor for all the things that need to be picked up. Cause; death (dropped glass). Effect; logistical nightmare and emotional turmoil (sometimes emotional turmoil, if [insert circumstantial things here]) (this is the shattered glass).

And that shattered glass is influenced by temperment (class), age (race), size (gender), distance dropped (social supports), and so on. Sometimes the shards aren’t all picked up, and your toe catches one lost under the fridge (that’s that moment that the grief gets prodded). Our deaths are part and parcel to the systems we live in now. Alua Arthur, founder of Going With Grace describes this exact thing in her book Briefly, Perfectly Human. As I come into my late 20s, I think about the systems that affect death near-daily. I am given to intensifying clarity in my purpose as someone who wishes to do this work, just as I had been given to understanding race, class, disability, and feminism on a whole in my adolesence.

I am in the process of the education now. But what my musings then become is something along the lines of ‘how do I challenge the commodification of death?’

I hope to talk about that part of my journey a bit more.